But I say to you... Going beyond the basics

 Sirach 15.15-20 ‘He has not commanded anyone to be ungodly.’

1 Corinthians 2.6-10 ‘A wisdom God decreed before the ages for our glory.’

Matthew 5.20-22a,27-28,33-34a,37 ’It was said to those of old; but I say to you.’

 

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Today’s gospel reading is pretty punchy.

Perhaps sometimes we hear this sort of Gospel passage and wonder where the message of love and kindness is to be found, isn’t this all a bit harsh and too strong?

There are two responses to that.

First, the love, mercy and faithfulness of God pervades the whole of scripture.

Bear in mind too that these verses are part of the Sermon on the Mount which contains the Beatitudes and the gentleness of that part of the message.

Perhaps what we’re getting in these verses is ‘tough love’; not the ‘gentle parenting’ that has become all the rage.

That takes us to the second response.

Don’t mistake being loving for being unchallenging: sometimes it is more loving to challenge.

If we’re looking for the ‘all you need is love’ message, what we find here is the challenge to love in a way that is more than just avoiding doing bad things.

It’s not good enough not to murder, not to commit adultery or not to swear an oath.

The spiritual life, coming closer to the way of Jesus, is made real by taming the angry self within; by averting the lustful gaze, by stopping beating around the bush so as to speak honestly.

St Thomas Aquinas, the medieval priest and theologian, describes love as willing the good other, for the sake of the other.

In other words, love of my neighbour is simply for their sake, just because they are there, not because of what I can get out of them; the other person is not a product or an object, but truly a person, someone made in the image of God.

So, if a Gospel reading like today’s gets under your skin that’s good: good, because it is moving your heart.

Something really important is going on here.

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, writing in the 1970s, develops Thomas Aquinas’ words wrote about treating people as persons not objects. Merton says:

Love is only possible between persons as persons. That is to say, if I love you, I must love you as a person not a thing. When we love another as an object, we refuse or fail to pass over into the realm of their spiritual reality, their personal identity… We have to love them for what they are in themselves, and not for what they are to us. (Thomas Merton, The Power and Meaning of Love)

Merton suggests that being able to love others in the way Christ loves them means we are the ones who need to be transformed.

That’s when Jesus says, ‘but I say to you…’

So, when we are angry with someone we de-personalise them by making them into a problem that corrodes our hearts.

When we look lustfully on someone we are making them an object, desiring them in a way that diminishes them and corrodes our hearts.

When we swear on something other than our own integrity then we are dodging our responsibility to treat someone as a person not an object.

This flies so much in the face of the culture we see around us.

We’re fed anger, lust and deceit all the time in the media, be that legacy media or social media, in public life, in art and film.

So we’re asked to reflect:

·       What is it in me that makes me angry with so and so? What’s that doing to my heart?

·       What is it in me that makes me look lustfully at someone? Now, the answer might be, ‘isn’t that obvious’ (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) but by looking lustfully I have declared in my heart that that person is an object of my desire, not a person to be honoured.

·       What is it that gets in my way of simply saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and meaning it? Who am I kidding? I am just protecting myself.

Jesus is certainly setting a high bar, ‘you have heard it said…but I say to you…’

The world, I think, can agree murder is bad; perhaps the jury is out nowadays on how devastating adultery is to a wronged spouse, and certainly children of a marriage; and as for honesty, well if you can get what you need by telling some porkies, good luck to you.

‘You have heard it said’: it seems many people haven’t heard that.

And even if everyone agreed with the Law of Moses about murder, adultery, oaths and keeping your word, Jesus calls us deeper.

‘Put out into the deep’ he says to Peter elsewhere.

Take the risk to recalibrate your life; pattern your life after the one who, faced violence with strength, who treated men and women with the dignity of being persons made in God’s image and growing into God’s likeness, who spoke plainly and truthfully, even though that was not received well.

Here’s the way to the wise living St Paul talks about. Bonkers to the world rejected by the rulers of this age, but revealed in the Lord of glory by the Spirit who searches everything.

May we be schooled, as we celebrate this Eucharist, into the ways of the love of Jesus Christ fashioning our lives into his, transformed into his glory.